Already, our country no longer attracts the best and brightest immigrants, who have historically helped shape and grow the U.S. to the world power it is today.

Countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are actively recruiting highly educated and skilled immigrants through policies supportive of visa applicants with advanced degrees or work experience.

And their efforts seem to be paying off. Only 22 percent of immigrants residing in Canada are low skilled-compared to almost 30 percent in the United States.

More than 46 percent of Canadian immigrants had obtained a high level of education. In the U.S, that number hovers at only 35 percent.

Based on these statistics, the U.S. clearly falls short. The U.S. educates some of the best and brightest immigrants from all over the world, but our current policies do not allow us to reap the rewards of those educational efforts. If the U.S. wants to remain competitive, we need immigration policies that grant employers the ability to hire competent, highly skilled individuals.

In 2012, the U.S. granted 500,000 F-1 student visas. Yet, during the same year, the employment H-1B visa-administered to immigrants who have a higher education degree-was capped at 150,000.

In the fiscal year 2014, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reached the statutory cap for H-1B visas within the first five days of the application-filing period.

Meanwhile, other countries with supportive immigration policies are attracting these educated people, allowing them to build centers of excellence. Both Canada and Australia now have significantly higher rates of foreign-born residents than the U.S.

Not only will immigration reform afford the U.S. the opportunity to entice immigrants with specialized skills, it will also inherently boost our economy.

Some insist immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy, but the numbers tell a different story. Through paying taxes and creating jobs, and through their buying power, immigrants are responsible for increasing the U.S. GDP by approximately $37 billion each year, according to a 2007 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Perhaps even more notable, immigrants founded 42 percent of America's Fortune 500 companies in 2012. At about 30 percent of the U.S. GDP, these companies have generated $4.5 trillion of annual revenue and have created more than 10 million jobs. Moreover, as reported by the Fiscal Policy Institute in 2007, immigrant-owned small business employed about 4.7 million people and generated $776 billion in receipts.

Clearly, we cannot dismiss the positive effects that immigrants have on our economy. By losing out on today's most highly educated immigrants and turning away those of tomorrow, the U.S. is in danger of losing its competitive advantage.

Fariborz Ghadar, the William A. Schreyer Professor of Global Management, Policies and Planning and the director of the Center for Global Business Studies at the Smeal School of at Penn State University. He is the author of the recently released "Becoming American: Why Immigration is Good for Our Nation's Future."